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ENTITY
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🎵Wisdom Density:
Moderate
🧭6 concepts
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Haven
Origin of Relationship
Haven was a joint healthcare venture announced in 2018 between Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and JPMorgan Chase (Jamie Dimon). The goal was to tackle the rising costs of healthcare for their US employees.
Major Milestones
- 2018: The partnership is announced. Buffett discusses it extensively at the Annual Meeting, describing healthcare costs as a "tapeworm" on the American economy. Todd Combs is appointed as the CEO to lead the venture.
- 2021: The venture is dissolved. Buffett acknowledges during the 2021 Annual Meeting that changing a system representing 18% of GDP proved too difficult, stating essentially that "the tapeworm won."
Strategic Importance
Haven represents a rare instance of Berkshire Hathaway partnering with other corporate giants to attempt a systemic disruption of a major US industry. It highlights Buffett's macroeconomic concern that healthcare costs—which had grown from 5% to 18% of GDP—were a massive drag on American economic competitiveness globally.
🔗 Connections
- Concepts: Healthcare Tapeworm
- Companies: Amazon
- Sources: 2018 Meeting, 2021 Meeting
📚 Historical Mentions & Citations (1)
Click a reference document below to expand and read the exact paragraph(s) containing this concept in the archive.
🎙️2018 MeetingExcerpt Available▼
2018 MeetingExcerpt Available
So if you decided to go with a nonproductive asset - gold - instead of a productive asset, which actually was earning more money and reinvesting and paying dividends and maybe purchasing stock - whatever it might be - you would now have over 100 times the value of what you would have had with a nonproductive asset. In other words, for every dollar you had made in American business, you’d have less than a penny by - of gain - by buying in this store of value, which people tell you to run to every time you get scared by the headlines or something of the sort. It’s just remarkable to me that we have operated in this country with the greatest tailwind at our back that you can imagine. It’s an investor’s haven - I mean, you can’t really fail at it unless you buy the wrong stock or just get excited at the wrong time. But if you’d - if you owned a cross-section of America and you put your money in consistently over the years, there’s just - there’s no comparison against owning something that’s going to produce nothing.
WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah. Well, I include, incidentally, in my - that part I wrote in the annual report where I said that roughly - nobody knows the answer on this. I mean, I could stick down two, and somebody else much smarter in insurance would stick down a different figure. But I think it’s about a 2 percent risk of what I call a 400 billion super-cat of all time. And But cyber is in that equation. I mean, that’s not just earthquakes and that sort of thing. And frankly, I don’t think we, or anybody else, really knows what they’re doing when writing cyber. I mean, we - it is just very, very, very early in the game. And we don’t know what the interpretations of the policies, necessarily, will be. We don’t know the degree to which they’ll be what - there’ll be correlated incidents, which we don’t really think are correlated now or haven’t had the imagination to come up with.